A system dump consists of the contents of the system memory regions that are in use in a computer at a given point in time. The system dump includes the program states of applications that were executing at the time. The operating system control structures, such as page tables, status flags, control registers, program counter and stack pointer are also captured in the system dump. Analyzing a catastrophic system or application failure is the most common purpose for creating a system dump. After its creation, the system dump is typically written to a non-volatile data file for further analysis to determine the root cause of the failure. Further, system activity is suspended and recovery is not begun until the transfer of the system dump to the data file is complete. Since system memory sizes of “3” terabytes (TB) are common in enterprise-class computer systems, collecting the system dump data becomes time consuming in view of increasingly strict system availability requirements, as may be set by service level agreements. Consequently, system administrators may be encouraged to either prematurely abort system dump data collection, or to forego it altogether, rather than extend the duration of the system outage.